Healthy Andy

There’s some great research I’d like to share with you on how to lower cholesterol naturally in a way that you probably haven’t thought of before.  Even better, this quirky and interesting research comes from my alma mater, Penn State University.  How did they do it?  Pistachios.

That’s right, it’s more than just an ice cream flavor, my friends.  Turns out, pistachios are a surprisingly potent health food with a broad range of effects.  For purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on the effects of these nuts on lowering LDL levels, usually referred to as the “bad” cholesterol.

These Lower Cholesterol Naturally? Who knew?

LDL Cholesterol

As a quick review, when you get your blood cholesterol levels checked, the main variables of interest are High Density Lipoproteins (HDL), Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL), and triglycerides (no acronym for that one).  They’re called “high” or “low” density based on the amount of protein in them. 

The HDL or high-density type is called “good” because that’s the kind that can actually scoop up chunks of cholesterol from the arteries and transport it away.  Nice, right?  So this stuff cleans up the arteries.

LDL cholesterol is pretty much the opposite.  This is the stuff that actually lodges in the arteries (the reasons and mechanisms behind this are the basis of a HUGE number of arguments and many nerdy-type people getting hot under the collar) and causes all kinds of problems… such as dropping over dead from a coronary, for instance.

For that reason, while we look at overall cholesterol levels, even more important is how much of the “good” cholesterol do you have versus the “bad” (LDL) stuff.  Obviously, if you have tons of the HDL cholesterol clearing the junk out of your arteries, and not a lot of the LDL cholesterol gunking the tubes up, that’s a good thing.

Pistachios Lower Cholesterol Naturally

So here’s what these researchers did.  Why they thought to pick out pistachios, I’ll never know, but they started off with a bunch of volunteers who ate the typical horrible American diet, with tons of fat and especially saturated fat.  Then, they switched these folks over to one of three groups:  just a healthy diet (they used one called a “Step One” diet to keep it consistent), that Step One diet plus some pistachios (about 10% of total calories), and the last group, which was the same Step One diet but lots of pistachios (about 20% of calories).

Here’s what they found.  The intake of pistachios increased the effect of the healthy diet on lowering LDL cholesterol in a dose dependent manner.  So the people eating some pistachios (the 10% group) had about a 9% additional decrease in LDL from their non-pistachio eating counterparts, while the heavy-hitter pistachio eaters (the 20% of total calories group) saw a 12% additional decrease from the pistachio-less group.

Pretty cool,  hunh?  What’s even more interesting is, the effects were far greater (seven times greater!) in lowering cholesterol naturally than could be expected by just the lipid profile of the nuts alone… in other words, we knew these nuts had healthy fats in them, and that should lower cholesterol, but not THIS much.  So what the heck is going on with pistachios?

The Inflammation Connection

Consistent readers of this site probably aren’t surprised to see the word “inflammation” popping up.  Chronic, systemic inflammation is the mechanism behind all kinds of diseases, and has been linked to cardiovascular disease big time.

So I wasn’t too surprised when I came across another study about pistachios, also out of Penn State, on a website that something to do with the Western Pistaschio Association.  What did surprise me was, there is a Western Pistachio Association. 

Anyway, this study showed that pistachio consumption ALSO reduced the signs of inflammation on a cellular level.  The researchers were able to suggest a link between this lowered inflammation and the seemingly strange ability of pistachios to lower cholesterol naturally.

Consider adding an occasional handful of pistachios into your diet to give your heart a helping hand… and no, eating pistachio ice cream doesn’t count!

Stay healthy!

I’ve mentioned CoQ10 in a previous post, but I want to discuss more specifically the importance of CoQ10 and statin drugs.

One of the best benefits of CoQ10 is for those individuals who are taking statin type drugs (such as Lipitor) to lower their cholesterol. I’m not interested in discussing the controversies over whether or not these drugs are actually effective for preventing heart disease- not in this post, at least.  What is clear, is that although these drugs do seem to be effective in lowering a person’s cholesterol levels, they also have the nasty side effect of dramatically reducing that same individual’s levels of a vital nutrient called CoQ10.

CoQ10 and Statins

How does that link work?  What is it about a statin drug that also greatly depletes this nutrient as well?  The answer lies in the mechanism of how a statin works.

The first thing to understand is that the body manufactures its own cholesterol.  Yes, even though cholesterol has been dragged out as some sort of heart disease bogeyman over the last few decades, it’s also true that your body NEEDS cholesterol.  It forms the basis for many vital structures in the body, like cell membranes, certain hormones, and Vitamin D.

So your body makes its own.  Most of that goes on in the liver, but this stuff is manufactured all over the body and then converted into whatever structure is necessary. 

We also get cholesterol from dietary sources, as well.  It’s interesting to note that breast milk has a high concentration of cholesterol in it (again indicating it is an important substance for the body).

The Mevalonic Acid Pathway; "ubiquinone" is another name for CoQ10

If a person’s blood chemistry shows excessive cholesterol levels, doctors will often prescribe a statin drug to try to lower those levels.  Here’s the idea behind that.

Statin drugs block a chemical precursor to cholesterol called mevalonic acid; the name isn’t important to remember.  Just recognize that, like anything else, cholesterol is made up of precursors or building blocks.  If I want to make a cake, I need flour and eggs and other stuff.  If I don’t  have any flour, I’m not making any cake.  If I don’t have any mevalonic acid, I’m not going to make any cholesterol.

Once you shut down the body’s own synthesis of cholesterol (or reduce it), those pesky blood test results should fall back into line the way the textbooks tell us they should.  Hooray!  Except, as is generally the case any time you start messing around with the body’s physiology, there’s a nasty side effect.

You see, the exact same chemical precursors that lead to the creation of cholesterol, also lead to the creation of CoQ10.  Like cholesterol, your body makes a certain amount of this stuff itself, and when you shut down the spigot that lets the body make cholesterol, you shut off the CoQ10 supply as well.  If I don’t have flour, not only can I not make cake, I can not make bread, either.

Benefits of CoQ10

So what?  What’s so extra-super special about CoQ10 that we should care about not having it?  Plenty, actually.

There’s two major benefits of CoQ10 that we’re currently aware of:

• It is a vital part of the electron transport chain (hang on, hang on, I’ll get to explaining that, I promise)
• It is a potent antioxidant in the mitochondria, the energy generator of the cell.

Let’s start with the first one:  the electron transport chain.

CoQ10 and Energy

The electron transport chain is a fancy-schwancy name for the way in which the cells of your body create energy.  You see, the cells don’t use glucose (sugar) for energy.  They use a refined form called ATP (adenosine triphosphate, you don’t need to remember that), which is created by… you guessed it… the electron transport chain.

This isn’t as complicated as it sounds.  It’s really just a series of chemical reactions orchestrated by your body to refine one thing into another.  As I like to explain it, if you have a gasoline generator, you can’t just pour crude oil in it and expect it to go vrooom.

No, you need to use a refined product of crude oil called gasoline, and you make that refined produt by doing various chemcial shenanigans to crude oil.  Similarly, your cells use some nifty chemical manuevers to turn glucose into the chemical form they can actually use (that ATP stuff).  CoQ10 is one of the chemicals used in those nifty manuevers.

Just like if you’re missing a key gasoline-refining chemical, you’re not going to be able to turn crude oil into gas, so too if you’re missing CoQ10,  you’re not going to be making much ATP.  And if that sounds bad, it should, considering it’s the main fuel source for every cell in your body. 

So, CoQ10 = pretty important.  But wait! There’s more.

Antioxidant Properties of CoQ10

In addition to actively participating in the generation energy in the cell, CoQ10 also acts as an antioxidant at the site of that energy creation.  Here’s what all that means.

That electron transport thing-a-ma-gig happens in a little chunk of your cell called the mitochondria.  It’s not terribly important to remember the name.  But it is important to know that there is a little mini-generator in each and every cell of our body, supplying that cell with the energy it needs to keep chugging along.

Most communities have a central power plant creating a huge amount of electrical energy that is then distributed over wires to individual households.  But imagine if each seperate household had its own generator?  That’s how it works inside your body.

Anyway, like any other piece of machinery, that generator can get rusty and fall apart over time.  In the body, we call it oxidative damage, and we prevent it with… all together now… anti-oxidants.

You’ve probably heard of antioxidants at some point in your life.  I’m not going to go into the details of how antioxidants protect the cell in this article… if you want to know more about that, you can read this article about how antioxidants work.

Suffice it to say that antioxidants kind of work like oiling a steel sword so it doesn’t rust.  There’s lot of different kinds of antioxidants, each of which seems to work best for certain kinds of areas of the body.  CoQ10 acts as a protective antioxidant in the mitochondria.

So not only does it work IN the generator as a part of the energy generation process itself, it also acts ON the generator as an anti-rusting protective agent.  Once again, we see CoQ10 = important.

Consequences of Lack Of CoQ10

Now that you know what CoQ10 does in the body, it’s not to hard to imagine what the result of a severe depletion of CoQ10 would be. Obviously, it’s going to be hard to create energy in the cell.  More specifically, it’s going to be hard to break sugar down into energy.

Additionally, the generators themselves are going to become more vulnerable to that ugly oxidative damage, also known as “rusting”… or, if you prefer, “aging”.  That’s right, oxidative damage is a big part of aging, and if you don’t protect your cell’s generators from it, they will rust up and fall apart, aging at an accelerated rate.

Knowing all that, it probably isn’t too surprising to hear that one of the major side effects of statins is muscle cramps (and other muscle problems).  If your muscle cells can’t create energy for themselves, they’re going to run into problems pretty quickly. I actually worry more about cardiac muscle than skeletal muscle when it comes to this, but hey, that’s just me.

CoQ10 Dosage for Statins

Luckily, CoQ10 is available in supplement form.  Actually, it’s also in most foods, it’s just that it’s in such tiny amounts that you’ll never eat enough to make a difference if you’re taking statins (so don’t even try).

Most people taking statins should at bare minimum take 100 mg a day to counteract the effects of that medication on their body.  If you’re taking a high dose of statins, go for more like 200 mg a day.

CoQ10 is a fat-soluble nutrient, so look for gelcaps filled with oil (soybean oil is a common choice).  There are some companies out there who have come up with a water-soluble way to provide CoQ10, but I suggest sticking with the oil-based, since that’s how it happens in Nature.

Either way, if someone you’re fond of is taking statins, be sure to pass on this article on the link between CoQ10 and statins… the health consequences are pretty stiff! 

Stay healthy!

Here’s a wild new bit of information.  It turns out your brain has a lot more control over your cholesterol than you might think.

Actually, you probably didn’t think your brain had anything to do with your cholesterol levels.  Nobody else did. Everybody’s pretty much just assumed that cholesterol levels were affected by diet, or maybe how much cholesterol your liver lets loose (your body actually manufactures cholesterol to make important stuff like hormones).

WRONG!  Turns out a hormone named ghrelin, which sounds like some sort of mideval forest monster but who am I to judge, inhibits some circuitry in the hypothalamus (this a piece of the brain).  When this particular circuitry (called MC4R) is inhibited, the body elevates levels of HDL, which is the good cholesterol.

If this all sounds like gobbledigook, let me explain it without the technical terms.  There’s a part of your brain that responds to a hunger-signaling hormone by increasing levels of the “good” cholesterol.  Turns out, you can mimic that effect by directly inhibiting those circuits with other chemicals.

Now, all of this is based on experiments with mice, but still, it’s a real eye-opener into just how cholesterol levels are actually regulated in the body.  It’s also a spotlight on just how complex neuroendocrine relationships really are… in other words, our endocrine (hormone) system and nervous system is far more intertwined then we know.

Stay healthy!

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/191037.php

Remember when everyone told you that eating fatty foods was going to give you high cholesterol?  Turns out, the story may be more complex than that.  Recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the higher your intake of sugar, the worse off your cholesterol levels are. 

This is actually a really interesting article on a couple of levels.  First off, let’s just talk about the cholesterol thing.

It’s kind of a big deal that somebody bothered to check this out, because as I mentioned before, for a long time the assumption was that eating foods high in cholesterol makes your blood cholesterol levels higher.  In this study, researchers questioned over 6,000 people on what they ate and then used that information to estimate sugar intake.

Blood samples were also drawn from all of the subjects, and the researchers found that with increasing sugar intake, the blood profiles got worse. Specifically, low sugar intake correlated with lower LDL (bad cholesterol) levels, lower triglycerides (this is also bad stuff) and higher HDL (good cholesterol).  So low sugar intake= better cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Interestingly (to me, at least) this correlation was strongest for HDL levels (again, that’s the good cholesterol).

There’s some potential confounding variables (big words for “a monkey wrench”) in this study.  For starters, if you’ve read any of my other posts concerning scientific studies, you know my stance on the dubious nature of self-report.  Simply put, PEOPLE LIE.  They fib about everything.  In fact, they even lie to themselves, when there’s nobody else looking!

Self-report is simply very, very unreliable.  Even if someone isn’t lying, they may over or underestimate whatever you’re asking them about.  So it would’ve been better to have these participants fill out a food diary as they actually ate throughout the course of a week (or whatever time frame you like).  That way you know they aren’t under or overestimating by trying to remember just what they ate last week. 

Try that out yourself, by the way.  Think back over what you ate last week.  I’ll bet you forget at least something.  Even harder would be to remember portion size.  So filling out a food diary would’ve been better (but logistically harder to do).  Of course, you still would have the problem of people lying on their self-report, but there isn’t much you can do about that, unless you’re planning on forming some sort of Food Self-Report Justice League (if you do, I’ll join if there’s a cool badge involved).

Anywho, the point is, self-report is a problem. But, considering the typical tendency of an individual is to UNDERestimate sugar intake… or really, underestimate any sort of unhealthy behavior (people hate to admit just how bad their diet is), then the problem of self-report isn’t as bad.  In fact, it may lead to the researchers underestimating just how important sugar intake is… in other words, the effect of sugar on cholesterol may be even GREATER than they measured. 

So, I’m willing to accept their findings as valid.  But there’s actually some more interesting facts that the researchers found out that I don’t think they planned on finding.

Namely, this: almost TWENTY PERCENT of the subjects were getting at least a quarter of their daily calories from sugar.  Not “carbohydrates”, SUGAR.  That’s almost 50 teaspoons of sugar a day.  Hang on.  Let me do some googling and calculating here.

Okay, I’m back. Fifty teaspoons of sugar translates to about eight ounces, or ONE FULL CUP of sugar!  EVERY DAY!

Gee, I wonder why we’re all so freakin’ fat?

One more reason to cut out the sugar, folks.  Start switching over to a whole foods diet and stay healthy!

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/20/added.sugar.lipids/